"I think the biggest challenge to tell John Apperson's story is there is just so much," Chirnomas said Thursday during the exhibit's opening. "So many documents and photographs and correspondence, and there's so many different stories that relate to him." Chirnomas became familiar with Apperson's work while he was researching his Dome Island book, which made him a prime candidate to work with the Lake George Historical Association on the exhibit.
"If not for Apperson, Dome Island would not have been preserved and left in its natural state," he said. "This exhibit's really going beyond Dome Island, that one accomplishment." Apperson actually bought Dome Island to keep a hotel from being built on it and then donated it to the Nature Conservancy.
The exhibit focuses on several key aspects of Apperson's involvement with the preservation of Lake George. This includes his early days camping on West Dollar Island and his one-man crusade to save it from eroding through riprapping the shoreline one stone at a time. Most Lake George islands now have riprapping, that is collections of small boulders along the island's shoreline, protecting the delicate earth, grasses and tree roots from the lake's waves.
The riprapping work was often completed in winter, as the rocks were taken by truck and slid into place along the ice and allowed to drop into the water during the spring melt. Apperson made it his mission to protect all the lands in and around Lake George. He would put his own well bei.